Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Chiggers

My college room mate's son is combat infantry at Fort Hood. I'm his family away from home as dad lives in Portland and mom in Sacramento.

Dad emailed me last night and said Pvt. Dave is getting eaten alive with chiggers. He's concerned about infection and asked me for advice. A couple of weeks ago when Pvt. Dave visited he complained about it and we talked a bit. They really beat the h___ out of these guys, spending weeks at a time in the Texas outback. He wears the heavy boots and they have little elastic bands to snug-up the pants at ankle level. This doesn't stop it.

The entire family is extremely allergic, basically assume allergic to the entire planet.

I can get by REI tomorrow and he's due here tomorrow night.

Can anyone recommend a way to stop chiggers?

http://www.howtogetridofstuff.com/pest-control/how-to-get-rid-of-chiggers/

Here's a link to some good info to start with. Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Jeff Long

Here are some additional online resources for the care and feeding of Chiggers!

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2100.html

http://www.salmoncreekflorafauna.org/chig/

Wow! The above responses have to be close to the universe of info on this topic. Thank you!

Yet another benefit of this board and those who post here: add "helps the troops" to "great info for nature addicts" and "saves lives".

When I was a small boy growing up in Southeast Texas, my grandmother would put wet snuff on mine. If she wasn't using (she wasn't quite a closet tobacco junkie) that day, she would use wet baking soda. Both remedies worked for me.

Just a small addendum to the last post by Memory Lapse: my daugther got stung by a bee while we were at an outdoor spa in Calistoga, CA. A woman was smoking a cigarette nearby and she told us that she had something that would make our daughter feel better. She made a poultice from the tobacco of one of her cigarettes and some water from the spa. She rubbed it on my daugher's skin where she had been stung. The pain was relieved and my daughter had no ongoing effects from the sting.

I always thought it must have been the medical qualities of the nicotin that helped. Maybe it has similar benefits with chigger bites.

It didn't motivate me or my wife or my children to start smoking!